by Lisa Unger
So, we passed the afternoon, chatting and unpacking, shelving books and unwrapping glasses. I skirted questions about my family in a way that had become second nature to me, offering vague half answers. Most people don’t press early on.
Where’s your family from? she asked casually.
South Florida, I answered.
Do you see them often? She wanted to know, clearly just making conversation. Well, I was just home for Christmas. You mentioned your family was still in the city? I tossed back.
It wasn’t lost on me that she changed the subject just as quickly when the focus shifted to her family. The relationships were strained, she’d said. No one ever really wanted to talk about that. But then we fell into an easy rapport, chatting about school, my suite mates, her years at NYU, how we both hated Hemingway and distrusted people who lauded his work, were fools for The Sound of Music (the hills are alive!). There was a definite love connection. She reminded me of someone. But I wouldn’t have been able to tell you who, not then.
We were laughing at something, I don’t remember what now, when we heard the front door. Her smile quickly faded and a tension settled into her shoulders. She moved away from me quickly.
“I’m home,” came a voice down the hall. “Mom? I’m hungry.”
“One of the other mothers picked him up today. We carpool,” she whispered. She looked guilty, as if she’d done something wrong and was hoping I’d cover for her. “I lost track of time.”
“In the kitchen, Luke,” she called. “I want you to meet someone.”
There was a pause, where she turned to me and offered a tight smile. Then I heard slow, careful steps approach. I don’t know what I was expecting, but certainly not the slim, handsome boy who stepped into the room. He was her younger, male double, the same creamy, pinched beauty. His eyes were dark like hers, intense and smart. His hair was a tousle, his eyes heavily lidded. I hesitate to say that there was a reptilian beauty to him, because that wouldn’t quite capture the flush to his skin, the shine to his eyes.
“Luke,” said Rachel. She moved over to him and gave him a peck on the head, then dropped an arm around him. “This is Lana. She’s going to be helping us out.”
He regarded me shyly, with the shade of a smile, and leaned in tight to his mother. I returned the smile, trying to keep the wattage down. I sensed a strange skittishness in him. I worried if I approached him too quickly, he’d retreat.
“Hi, Luke,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Can you say hello?” she prodded, when he didn’t say anything. She cast me an apologetic look. Finally, he took a step forward and offered me his hand. It was soft and hot in mine.
“Nice to meet you,” he said.
What was there between us in that very first moment that would have told, if observed, everything that would follow? Nothing. I am sure of it. Not anything, not a twinge of instinct, not an internal shudder. He was that good.
“You’re pretty,” he said.
I felt the heat rush to my cheeks, even as I saw Rachel visibly relax. A broad smile crept across her face and it was unmistakable as relief. I, on the other hand, felt my tension ratchet as he kept his eyes on me. Inside I squirmed as I always do when someone looks at me too long. I thought he’d break his gaze, but he didn’t, and my face was burning. Still, I didn’t lower my own eyes either. It was some kind of strange, subtle standoff that I didn’t like, but from which something inside me refused to back down.
As I look back now, it was really the first move in the game we’d already started playing. There was something about him, about our chemistry, that immediately hooked us into each other. But it was all so brief, just a second. Finally, it was Rachel who broke the moment, lightly, as if she hadn’t noticed anything passing between us. And maybe nothing had, I thought then—just a curious boy unsettling a person who was too self-conscious at the best of times.
“Why don’t you change out of your school clothes, and I’ll get you a snack?” Rachel said.
He nodded and bounded off like any other eleven-year-old boy. And I felt silly as he galloped away.
I’d expected someone different. Someone obviously hyperactive, or disturbed like some of the kids I’d worked with at Fieldcrest. Not just from the way Rachel had described him, but from the way she acted as she described him. She was as nervous, as wary, as an abused woman, as if wondering when the next blow might be delivered and forever scheming as to how she might avoid it. As he pounded up the steps, I actually found myself wondering a little about what might be wrong with her.
She walked over to the steps and peered up, as if she was concerned that he might be listening. Then she returned to the kitchen, and grabbed my arm, smiling giddily. She leaned in close. I’m not sure if she noticed me shrink from her touch.
“He likes you,” she whispered, as if I’d just won a fabulous prize.
3
Is the prey complicit in its own demise? Are we not seduced in some small way by the beauty, the grace, even the dangerous soul of the predator? Do we not look into its eyes and see something that excites us, that entices, even hypnotizes us? Yes, in some sense, I think we are seduced by danger. When we stand on the edge of a precipice and look down at the deadly fall, who among us doesn’t imagine tipping his weight over and plummeting to a bone-shattering death? And it’s not just terror that we feel at the thought. There’s a thrill there, too, isn’t there? Or maybe that’s just me.
“So, how did it go?” Langdon asked the next day as I entered his classroom. I was the first to arrive, as I usually am to all my classes but especially to his.
“I got the job,” I said.
He looked up from his notes and pushed his glasses up, gave me a nerdy smile.
“Hey! Good for you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m excited.”
He looked back down at the text on his desk. “Awesome,” he said distractedly.
“The kid’s a student at Fieldcrest.”
I put my bag under my seat on the far left of the front row. Langdon usually kept the lighting dim and the room cool. The bright fluorescent lights hurt his eyes and made everyone look hungover, he’d said when I’d asked why. That’s because everyone is hungover, I’d answered. He’d found that funny.
“Oh,” he said. He wore a frown now. “Who is it?”
“Luke; Lucas, I think. Lucas Kahn?” I said, hating that everything I said sounded like a question. It was a verbal tic I couldn’t seem to master.
He looked up at the ceiling with a little scholarly squint.
“I haven’t worked with him,” he said after a moment.
This was hopeful news. Langdon generally worked one-on-one with the most difficult cases, the callous-unemotional kids, a term they used a lot at Fieldcrest. These children—who display a total lack of empathy, disregard for others, and a severely deficient affect—are those whom certain experts now believe will evolve into psychopaths. But a 2008 review of this diagnosis found that there was not sufficient evidence for it to be included in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Even so, most child psychiatrists recognized these early warning signs of very bad things to come. Of course, the mind is a mysterious thing and the mind of a child even more mysterious still. So everyone in the field was pretty careful about what kind of diagnoses they threw around. Some children grow out of their disorders, rather than grow in. (I was living proof of that. Sort of.) If Langdon wasn’t working with Luke, maybe Luke wasn’t that bad.
I told him about the interview, the unpacking, the pleasant dinner that had followed with all of us chattering and laughing as if we’d known each other forever. It was actually a little strange. It had stayed with me, the feeling that I had known Rachel and Luke for a very long time. I was more comfortable at their table on our first night of knowing each other than I had ever been with my own family.
“Well, good,” he said. “It sounds like you’re all going to get something out of this. I’ll ask around about him.�
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I almost said, Don’t! I don’t even know why, maybe I didn’t want anything to break the charm. Instead I said, “How did you know?” Because it had been he who found the ad and insisted that I call.
“Just a feeling,” he said. He flashed that funny smile he had, and I felt a familiar flutter in my belly, which I immediately quashed. In our closest moments, I had this sense that he’d always been around to advise me and listen to my problems. And I hoped he always would be, in one way or another. But I refused to be the cliché. I was not and would never be the student who had a hopeless crush on a professor.
The rest of the students started to file in, and Langdon turned back to his notes. It was the first day of my final class with him, abnormal psychology. Of course, I already knew more about the subject than I wanted.
You see, I am a person with secrets. And I guard them carefully, keep them locked in a box inside myself. I rarely opened the lid of my psyche to look inside. Almost no one, except the doctor I saw in town, knew the truth about who I was, or my history. There was very little I wouldn’t have done to keep it that way. Shame was a thick cloak that I wrapped around myself and hid beneath. It was dark and lonely, but at least it was safe.
I opened my notebook as Langdon took the podium.
“Where is the line between normal and abnormal? At best, it is faint and nebulous, isn’t it? We’ve talked in your earlier classes about the difficulty of drawing that line in some cases, about the various criteria used to make diagnoses in our field and design appropriate and effective treatment. In this class, we’ll discuss the types of cases that are undeniably over the line into abnormal. Over the last decade, new research in the areas of genetics and neuroscience has us thinking about mental illness in an entirely new way. How much of it is environment, how much biology? How much the union of those two things? And what other elements contribute? What, if any, power do we have in the most extreme cases to be of service?”
He went on and on in the dim room, and I bowed my head dutifully scribbling notes, wondering if he had anything to teach me about mental illness that I didn’t already know.
I found the keys in the planter, just as Rachel had promised, and let myself in. It was a carpool day and Luke would be home at three.
“Just, you know,” she said on the phone, “just let him do what he wants. Make him a snack, let him watch television or play a video game. I’ll supervise his homework after dinner.”
She sounded nervous.
“Don’t worry,” I told her.
“And if anything, just call,” she said. “I’m minutes away.”
She was opening a bookstore in town, which impressed me as being nothing short of suicidal in the electronic-book age. But she had leased a spot on the square and was waist-deep in renovations. It was to be a bookstore and café, a gathering space with a wireless Internet service. She was planning discussion groups and open-mike poetry nights, free coffee for study groups. She had a thousand ideas for the space and the passion of a zealot—parties, author visits, story time, a small play space in the kids’ section. I simultaneously admired and felt sorry for her.
“Don’t worry,” I said again. “We’ll be fine.”
“Stroll down if you two feel like getting out for a while,” she said.
“We will.”
We, that magic word, that syllable of belonging. Its sound tells others that you are a part of something instead of apart from everything, which is how I have always felt.
The house had the special hush of emptiness, where all the sounds we don’t hear—the heat, the refrigerator, the settling and creaks—create a quiet symphony. Rachel had cleared some more boxes and the place was looking more settled. There was a pile of newspaper on the table, an empty coffee cup, rinsed and sitting in the dish rack. I found myself compelled to walk around. As I climbed the stairs, I heard some cubes drop in the icemaker and it made me jump a little.
Her room was at the top of the stairs, the master suite. Light washed in through a big bay window where there was a cozy seat with chenille throw pillows and a folded blanket. A low bed was covered all in white with crisp linens and a down comforter. Silk pajamas were tossed over a dove-gray chair. A hardcover book by an author whose name I didn’t recognize sat askew on the bedside table. On the cover a slim girl walked into a stand of trees.
I walked down the hall. Two other bedrooms were totally empty except for a few unopened boxes. Rachel had mentioned that she planned to use one of them for her office. She said that she used to write and had plans to start a new novel after they had settled in. She’d said it with a certain wistfulness, as though she were not at all sure that they would settle in. I had been curious enough to Google her name, to see what she might have written. But nothing turned up. Actually, nothing at all turned up. Similarly, nothing came up for Lucas Kahn. So, he hadn’t been in any real trouble—which was comforting.
Luke’s room was the expected disaster area. Boxes half unpacked, clothes in piles, books stacked beside the shelves. There was a huge computer screen on his desk, which was part of a wall unit of shelves and cubbies. He had his own television. Cable box and video-game system lay on the floor; long, black umbilicals led back to the large flat-screen mounted on the wall. A wireless game controller sat on the beanbag seat.
It would be another half hour before he got home. So I started shelving the piles of books on the floor. I didn’t want to just sit around doing my reading when I was being paid fifteen dollars an hour.
I got immersed in the project, as I am prone to do, organizing books by subject and size, and I lost track of time. I must not have heard him come in.
“What are you doing?”
I spun, startled, to see him standing there. Backpack slung over one shoulder, coat in his hand. He had some kind of blue paint on his shirt, and a warrior stripe of it on his right cheek.
I felt guilty, as if I’d been caught stealing.
“Oh, Luke,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Obviously,” he said. There was no trace of the shy, sweet boy I’d met the other day. He was icy, his face slack and eyes dead. He walked into the room and put his backpack down. He stood blocking the door, and looked at me with unmistakable menace. I found myself thinking of Rachel, and how skittish she was around him.
“I was helping your mother unpack the other day,” I said. I lifted my chin and squared my shoulders to him, kept my voice low and easy. He wasn’t going to cow me as he had his mother; that was for sure. “So I thought I’d help you start shelving your books.”
“I don’t want your help,” he said. “Get out.”
Gut-punched by the quiet ugliness of his tone, I let the book drop from my hand to the floor with a thud, rather than move to put it on the shelf. I kept his gaze as I moved past him toward the door. I am not a large person. Always the smallest kid at school, as an adult I stood just over five foot four inches, with a slight build. He was only eleven but he did not seem that much smaller than I was. We were nearly the same height. My arm brushed his on the way out. My face must have been scarlet, as it always got when I was angry or embarrassed.
“My mother told you to make me a snack and then let me do what I wanted, right?”
“Uh,” I said. I turned to face him. I wasn’t going to let him talk to my back as if I were the help, which maybe I was. But fuck that. “Yes, that’s right.”
“Then do that,” he said. Again, we locked eyes.
He followed me as I exited the room and closed the door behind me. I turned around, considered knocking and apologizing, trying to get off on a better foot. But then I noticed that there was a lock on the outside of the door. Did she lock him in there sometimes? I don’t know how long I stood there, looking at the lock. It seemed so odd, so incongruous with the woman I met. It wasn’t reasonable, was it, under any circumstance to have a lock on the outside of your child’s door? A dead bolt? But, then again, maybe it was already there when they moved in. Mayb
e she hadn’t put it there at all.
I went downstairs and called Rachel, told her what happened. She sighed heavily when I was done, and I felt like a failure. I could hear the sound of someone hammering in the background.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just trying to help you out. Like the other day.”
She sighed again. I expected her to tell me that it was okay and not to worry. But she didn’t.
“Just make him a ham sandwich with apple slices,” she said. “And put it outside his door. He’ll get it after you’ve gone back downstairs. Just stay away from him. He might get over it and come down. If not, I’ll be home by six.”
“Okay,” I said. I thought I heard her disconnect the call, and I was about to hang up.
Then, “Lana?”
“Yes,” I said. I was childishly eager that she not be mad at me, that she would offer some words of support.
“You’re a tattletale.”
I realized that it was Luke, not Rachel. He’d obviously been listening in on the line upstairs, chiming in now that his mother was off the phone.
Embarrassment and a flash of anger got the better of me.
“Luke?” I said.
“Yes,” he answered, mimicking me with annoying accuracy.
“You’re a brat.”
I heard him gasp, then start to laugh. He hung up the phone, but I still heard him laughing upstairs. I instantly regretted it and figured I would be fired on my very first day as a working adult. Fine, I thought. Whatever. He was a brat and someone needed to tell him that. He was obviously running the show around here and had been for a while.
